J. M. Le Clézio - Terra Amata

It was no use trying to escape or to forget: it was a total war, without mercy. Every second a new body was born somewhere on earth, pushing an old body into the abyss. They were everywhere: these dwarfs with men’s and women’s faces spied on you ceaselessly from gardens, out of car windows, from behind trees, or from the shadows. They listened. They continually stole your thoughts, your words, your acts, your passions. They ate your food, breathed your air, they even went off with your wives.

But after all it was not really so unfair: it was simply the truth. For you had stolen before them; like them you had killed in order to live.

And one day, towards the middle of his life, Chancelade was on the beach with the boy that was his son. They sat in the sun for a bit before noon, then went in swimming. Chancelade came out of the water first and stretched out on the pebbles to dry. The boy came up a few minutes later and lay down on Chancelade’s right. He was rather a tall child for his age, which was about twelve or thirteen, thin, with a handsome face and fair hair slicked down by the sea. He wore navy blue trunks with a fish on the left hip, and his clothes were rolled up under his head as a pillow. He lay for a long while without moving, stretched out on his back with his eyes shut, feeling the drops of salt water contract and evaporate all over his body. Then he turned over on his front so as to dry his back, and began to watch what was going on on the beach, his chin resting on his fore-arm. What he saw was:

A girl with bleached hair undressing. She unzipped her green dress and her body appeared in the sun, all white except for the two red patches of her bikini.

A family just departing, that consisted of: a hairy man, a fat woman, a ten-year-old girl, also fat, an eight-year-old boy, also fat, a baby in a carrier, a transistor, and an orange-striped sunshade.

Two men unloading a van.

A flash of light deep in the hills.

An empty brilliantine bottle caught between the pebbles.

A helicopter.

A man and a woman lying on the beach and embracing.

A woman with a deep tan coming out of the water and leaving a trickle of water behind her as she limped over the burning pebbles.

Two children playing ball and squealing.

A seagull.

An old woman reading a love-story under a mauve parasol and fanning her face very close with a fan that had Hotel Ristor-ante ‘La Tonnara’, Amentea, Statale 18, written on it; or something like it.

All round the boy the beach curved gradually away. At a hundred yards, or even less, you could no longer distinguish the pebbles; you only saw a sort of grey and white mass hazy in the heat. The air danced, the ground buckled gently, and the blue sea moved ceaselessly, throwing up here and there a spatter of hard light. The sun blazed right in the zenith like an electric light bulb crazily screwed into the cupola of the sky. When the boy got tired of lying on his front and looking at all this he turned over and sat facing the sea. He looked for a moment at Chancelade, who was still lying on his back. He gazed curiously at the tall muscular body, the two symmetrical feet, and the face lit from below with its two black holes of nostrils. He looked at the red and black nylon bathing trunks, and saw under the belt, to the right, the trade-mark in big letters: DIVE.

He picked up a pebble and examined it idly, thinking perhaps that it would be easy to kill his father with, or perhaps that it was the amoebas’ Mount Everest. Then he threw it into the sea, not aiming at an old tin can that was drifting along the shore. The pebble flew through the air without a sound, almost invisible in its speed, and following a predetermined curve. When it hit the surface of the water between two waves there was a brief ‘plop’, then nothing more. The boy did it again, once, twice, three times, and each time it ended in the same way.

Chancelade sat up, looked round him for a moment, lit a cigarette, and said:

‘Half past twelve.’

The boy threw a stone and said:

‘Yes.’

‘It’s hot,’ Chancelade went on.

The boy threw another stone and said:

‘Yes.’

‘It’ll probably end in a storm,’ said Chancelade.

The boy picked up some pebbles with his left hand and threw them one by one with his right. Each time he followed the trajectory closely until the stone disappeared in a swift whirlpool, the sea opening and immediately closing again.

‘I wonder—’ he said.

Chancelade wasn’t paying much attention. He was smoking. A small rivulet of sweat ran down between his shoulders.

‘What?’ he said.

‘That,’ said the boy. ‘I wonder how the stone gets from here to there.’

Chancelade shook the ash off his cigarette.

‘Because you threw it, I should think.’

‘No, I—’ said the boy. Every time he threw a stone he stopped talking. ‘I wonder what it means — You see, when I watch the stone there’s a certain moment — There’s a certain moment when it isn’t touching anything — it isn’t touching my hand, or the ground, or anything, and yet — And yet it goes on flying through the air — Like that, and if you took it at that moment — If you took it at that moment perhaps you’d find it contained something — Something new, energy, or — I mean if you could get hold of it without stopping it — Because otherwise it wouldn’t be the same, it—’

‘Yes, but all the same it’s your hand that threw it.’

‘I know, but that’s only the initial reason — But suppose — Suppose someone just opened his eyes now at this moment — He might wonder how this stone — Came to be flying through the air like that — Without any apparent reason—’

‘Yes, but suppose he opened his eyes a second later. Then he wouldn’t see anything.’

The boy threw another pebble into the water. It was reddish and flat, and bounced once on the surface before it disappeared. The boy thought for a moment and said:

‘That doesn’t prove anything. Because if he’d counted the stones at the bottom of the sea he’d know there was one more, and he might — he might wonder where it came from.’

He turned his head and saw that his father wasn’t listening. The man in the red and black trunks was lying on one elbow, smoking his cigarette and looking vaguely out over the sea. The boy tried to see what it was Chancelade was gazing at, but there was nothing: just the curved blue expanse of sea and the waves sparkling like bits of broken mirror.

The boy thought for a bit longer, holding a stone in his hand. Then he said, as if to himself.:

‘Yes, but anyhow — Anyhow, that’s not what I meant. I meant that for these stones, first here, then there, the idea of time is really only — only a matter of bearings. To be able to say that a stone has travelled from the beach to the sea you’d have to have seen me throw it, otherwise it’s as if nothing had happened. And that’s funny, because—’ He groped for words for a few seconds.

‘Because it’s as if you could go to sleep, and time not pass. Suppose someone slept for a year, or even for ten, say; then, when he woke up he’d think only one night had passed, because he usually only slept for one night.’

‘Yes, but the ten years would have passed just the same.’

‘No, because I mean, I mean it’s an individual matter. It isn’t the same for any two people. Of course there are clocks and calendars and all that, but they’re just artificial, just bearings that have to be interpreted. If you did away with them, or if you stopped anyone from interpreting them, that would be that. For some people it’d be ten years, for others one year, and for others three or four days or even only a few hours.’

‘Maybe. But how could you do away with all the bearings?’